Our London Correspondent Nick Ayton, the sage of Shoreditch summarizes another great few weeks in the fintech capital.

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Our London Correspondent Nick Ayton, the sage of Shoreditch summarizes another great few weeks in the fintech capital.

ICOs remain the investment vehicle of choice for crypto-entrepreneurs

While VC and seed investment levels may have dropped recently there is no doubt the preferred fundraising method remains an ICO as a simpler, lower friction and faster means for entrepreneurs to raise capital.

It has been another great month for ICOs with a couple of Blockchain Gaming opportunities, Contingency and Etheroll and with EdgeLess starting in the few days the gaming sector promises a great deal of disruption ahead.

Coupled with Lykke a crypto asset exchange, Humaniq 4.0 banking for unbanked, Melon Project for asset and Intellisys for fund management and with Chronobank just finishing, February 2017 has been a pivotal month and a major step forward for the evolution of a Capital Markets 2.0 economy.

Best of all the good news is March is lining up to be an even stronger month for launching new Blockchain businesses that will create more havoc and disruption across a wide range of industries and bring about new business models and ways of exchanging products and services as value.

We will soon see a TRUMPCoin

With the plethora of crypto altcoins and Colored coins that cover almost every industry from music and entertainment, porn, supply chain, recruitment and time itself will we see a TrumpCoin increase in value when Donald the businessman finds out Vladimir Putin already has one. Will he use TrumpCoin to Trump PutinCoin?

I am not sure about the investment value of PutinCoin though given its value and MarketCap but I intend to buy TrumpCoin with its slogan “Let’s rebuild America” is encouraging and suggests his fans will start buying coins by the dozen. The Donald is sure to be very happy as of writing this article, TrumpCoin at number 102 and PUTINCoin at 109 on the long list of crypto coin tokens.

Game on then.

Satoshi spotted again

I caught up with Vittalark Buttering at Liverpool Street station just by the thriving fintech hub of Shoreditch. He was looking anxious as usual.

Cointelegraph: So, Vittalark, how is it going? I have seen you since England France at Twickenham.

Vittalark Buttering: I saw him you know, I chased him through the crowd for 40 minutes and then I lost him near the men’s toilet under the West Stand. We have the same rucksacks with a “Bitcoin Sold Here” sticker on them.

CT: Where are you off to now?

VB: I found out that on a Friday Satoshi likes to get a pedicure at the Chinese FooSpar near Spitalfields Market run by Mr. Woo. I sent Mr. Woo one BTC and asked him to tip me off when Satoshi comes in.

Vittalark then gets out his iPhone and shows me the text.

The text reads: “Mr. Vit, it’s Woo here, ‘him is here’, socks are off, you cum quik, his feet in water with fishies now.”

VB: You see it is him.

Vittalark then called Mr. Woo “Mr. Woo it is Vittalark here. Just to let you know I am on my way woo be with you in five minutes, don’t let him have his shoes and socks until I get there.”

And then Vittalark was gone, last seen running up Bishopsgate towards Spitafields with his rucksack flapping his Bitcoin Sold Here stickervisible as he is clearly in a rush.

Good luck, Vittalark, I hope Mr. Woo will help you get your man. I look forward to the day we can see a selfie of Vittalark and Satoshi together at last.

IBM announces HyperLedger Fabric Composer

I spent a great day at IBM Labs Hursley this week the centre of Hyperledger activity to learn more about IBMs Blockchain plans, I see them as one of the strongest and most complete Blockchain offerings available. As a cross-industry distributed ledger technology, Hyperledger is maturing fast and sits alongside Intel’s SawtoothLake and Iroha (named after a Japanese poem) that can cover most organizational and industry needs. A permissioned distributed ledger technology that doesn’t use a token and where nodes act as notary validators and where block size and consensus can be adjusted to the user requirement.

I have to say I like the look of HyperLedger, especially SawtoothLake that offers core infrastructure to support and underpin a strong IoT offering (as in Smart Planet, Smart Cities) that comes with a more economic consensus model called POET (Proof of Elapsed Time) and another partner Blockchain Iroha that offers a special link to mobile using clever APIs that open the door to Blockchain/5G integration with an extensive library of IOS and Android dev apps which will be a real game changer delivering low latency, scalable and high throughput Blockchain, when 5th Generation wireless data-comms finally rolls out.

The HyperLedger Fabric is a solid offering and fits together nicely and with the new fabric composer, it is now easier to link smart contracts, with inputs and applications. It doesn’t take too much imagination to realize that with SawtoothLake with Intel’s hardware expertise, and Iroha in toe will be part of the next generation of IoT support infrastructure enabling billions of devices to write transactions back to the secure digital ledger, at speed and scale. Should be a real winner.

ChocoholicCoin just in time for Easter

I came across Gill at the Chocolate Hotel in Oxford Street the center of London’s west end shopping district as she barged me out of the way to get to the new dark chocolate orange cups that had just gone on sale.

It turns out this rather rotund lady is a chocoholic entrepreneur who goes by the name of Gillian Sweeting aka @LondonSweetLady. I decided to find out her plans to flood the London Markets with chocolate and ChocoholicCoins.

CT: What’s the big idea behind ChockieCoin?

LSL: No its ChocoholicCoin for people who can’t get enough, who want to make sure they don’t lose out at Easter when the “easter bunnies” deliver everyone’s chocolate eggs.

CT: How does it work?

LSL: In two ways, you leave ChocoholicCoins for the fairies who control the bunnies to make sure they come to your house and if you get caught short you can eat them.

CT: No, seriously!

LSL: This is very serious, when you buy chocolate with our Coin you can scan the QR code on the back and see exactly where the cocoa came from, who processed it, packed it and shipped it. All production and supply chain activities are recorded on the Blockchain so they can’t be tampered with and their provenance checked.

CT: Can’t someone steal and eat the Chocolate when it’s en route?

LSL: Not really the cartons are also tagged with sensors and any attempts to move them from their journey, open the carton or try to eat them triggers our operations center where Fred presses the RED Button that gives the perpetrator an 11,000 volts jolt.

OK, then ChocoholicCoin sounds really interesting especially the bit about paying off the fairies albeit it can all end badly as I imagine 11,000 volts would also melt the chocolate.